summer replacement

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I’m working on an essay about tragedy and politics at the moment, and it has turned into a rather large project. That, and the prospect of various summer adventures, one of which will take me to New Mexico, leave me uncertain when I will post something new here. Meanwhile, here’s a piece I wrote just over a year ago whose fundamentals remain, though its occasion has passed.

I retired officially fourteen years ago and moved to Saint Louis, but since that time I’ve continued to work part time at Saint Louis University. I taught basic English classes for a while; then for the past eleven years I have offered a senior honors seminar called Great Books. Somewhere in there I also served as an assistant dean in SLU’s now defunct graduate college. This spring I’ve decided to retire completely, partly because my beloved is retiring and partly because it’s time.

I’ve loved Rilke’s poem, “Herbsttag,” for many years, love the opening especially in English, “It is time, Lord . . . ,” not so much about what it is time for the speaker to do as a proleptic evocation of what God might do, the near casual feeling of those first few words juxtaposed as they are to a set of cosmic expectations couched in rhetorically extravagant flourishes. Clearly this speaker’s autumn reflection means to image a metaphysical autumn, a time of last things, of passage from one life state to another. The poem is widely available. Here it is together with a number of translations.

I share the restlessness of the poem’s concluding lines. I am neither homeless nor friendless, except in the sense of being alone as we all are alone, but I am experiencing at least two contrary emotions as I think about the future. These inspire no new thoughts about death—it’s out there somewhere. Rather, what I am experiencing is a conflict between desiring to do old age as a contest between my body and the set of physical limitations that come with being almost eighty on the one hand, and on the other a contrary desire to take a nap.

Taking a nap has its advantages, I suppose, if one is willing to slide into decline and live with one’s memories. But I remain restless, walking up and down whatever streets I find to walk in, writing late at night, writing trivia, still seeking to overcome it, returning to old forms of thought I had abandoned for years, looking for my ancestors. I wrote a passable sonnet not long ago. I wrote a villanelle, not really good but a villanelle nonetheless. I’d like to write a good one. I may return to rhyme, not a bad spiritual exercise.

I’m describing a state of mind that many readers have found in Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” but that poem’s naïve evocation of the will bespeaks its late romantic origin and the youthful mind of its author. Tennyson was only 24 when he wrote “Ulysses,” a poem more likely to appeal to the youthful Bobby Kennedy (who loved it, as everyone knows, I think) than to someone at my time of life. Still, my restlessness is real, and my own. I need to learn to exploit it rather than merely living with it. I can hear the voice of some learned person reminding me of Ernest Becker, but Becker’s various immortality projects seem to me to belong to youthful thinking as well.

My beloved and I are gearing up for some travel, road trips around our own continent—though we haven’t ruled out travel abroad. I have a long list of projects to complete or cause to be completed at home, some of which must be finished before another winter. I have walks to take, some with camera in hand. I have friends to talk with and books to read, a villanelle to write and potentially a new project to explore closed forms of poetry I abandoned years ago after publishing a set of sonnets I came to dislike. There’s a certain comfort in playing with closed forms and an existential discomfort that goes with writing in open ones. So my closed form project may be a hdege against restlessness.

But I guess I’m trying to school myself to think of old age as an invitation not to design an immortality strategy (pace Becker) but still to live with as much gusto as I can muster for the remaining time I have. I’m aware of my huge good fortune in possessing good health, though I need to take off a few pounds (actually more than a few). So my prescription for myself is contingent upon continued good health and therefore is for myself alone; though you’re welcome to stop by, if you like. We can have a coffee at Mokabes or a beer at The Shaved Duck if it’s late enough in the day, and talk about whatever’s in the air.

I think I may be reconciled to living in the city I have in the here and now, not in another one to come (pace Plato and St. Paul). The academy was in some ways my city to come, to be sought or founded in the realm of discourse. But nobody can really live in such a place, and one thing I may have learned from this perception is that it is the very accidental character of real cities that makes them fit for human habitation, just as it is uncertainty that makes human life bearable and sometimes joyous; though I don’t carry the argument so far as Marilynn Robinson does, arguing from Johathan Edwards that the apparent arbitrariness of the world bespeaks a creator.

My life has also been fortunate in that I’ve never been denied culture, never lacked means or opportunity to refashion myself when I needed to do so. It’s sometimes comforting to think that given the world as it seems I’d live the same life, ask for the same jobs, over again—though I know I wouldn’t. I’ve refashioned myself sufficiently and often enough to be aware that self creation is surrounded by a thick matrix of contingency. A friend used to like to paraphrase Heraclitus ‘You can’t step in the same river even once.’ One isn’t guaranteed the world as it seems, not tomorrow, maybe not even yesterday.

So that one founds oneself in the realm of discourse as the world rushes by—and one is fortunate if the real city one lives in affords hidey holes, places to escape, and lots of unsupervised spaces for play. The real and contingent city is as febrile as a summer street dance, as brief on the wind as a smile and a shoeshine, thick with possibility and empty of information about itself as a week-old newspaper. One dwells in it upon sufferance—I’ll go that far with Robinson, since I know neither the beginning nor the end of the place that passes.

And I guess I’ll continue to write this blog and try to post more regularly than I have recently. There’s more to my restlessness than the common struggle with mortality. Though I’m not sure what the more is, I seem to need to continue thought projects I know I’ll never complete.

the doe and the angel: thoughts on the empty tomb post Easter

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In the beginning I find I want to remember Paul Robeson, whose birthday occurred on April 9. Even though I’m late, I thought I’d post this little video again in honor of the occasion. It stirs up something I want to say after a relatively dry period.

Politics aside, Robeson was a great singer and a phenomenal talent in many other ways, a consensus All-American football player and eventual hall of fame inductee who played in the old NFL, a graduate of Rutgers University where he was class Valedictorian, and of Columbia law school, an international star. If you’re not familiar with his life or know of him only as a name associated with communism, you might like to read a short biography. A couple of not bad ones are here, and here.

Robeson ended his life in sad obscurity, but his reputation revived in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. Given our country’s present neofascist turn against civil rights, Robeson’s life and example, not to mention his voice, can serve as at least a small reminder of the civilized people we might have been in the united States of America and of a part of what we have now willfully thrown away.

I told the story of making this video here. It has not been unpopular, and it presently has more hits than any other performance of “Joe Hill” listed at You Tube. I think that may have as much to do with the way the song fits Robeson’s voice as with anything else. When I think of “Joe Hill” and the singers I admire who have been associated with it recently: Luke Kelly, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen—none has quite the eloquence or the authenticity of the Robeson performance. I think of it as I sometimes remember this, a guitar pick and a Wobbly membership card left on the step at Mother Jones’s grave some years ago when I was there.

It’s important to me that such people be remembered, now that most of our founding narratives have failed us in this country. I believe they are reminders, not of who we are, or were, but of who we might have been. This month’s issue of Orion, a magazine I can’t recommend too much, carries a lead article by Paul Kingsworth that evokes the historical trough I’ve thought about in a good many posts on this blog. Kingsworth takes up Karl Jaspers’s old idea of an axial age and suggests that we may be living in another one now, a time when all the old ways of thinking and doing are open to new and urgent questioning and the future of the experiment with life on this planet seems to hang in the balance.

But in the final analysis Kingsworth is both too optimistic and too nostalgic for me. I don’t think the old stories will save us from ourselves. For many of us the old stories only reinforce popular bigotry and the violence of extractive capitalistic practice. That is why I am coming to believe we should think of Robeson and Jones and Dr. King and perhaps even the prophets of Jasper’s axial age, Jesus and Buddha and Socrates and Mohammad, as witnesses to who and what we might have been, and reminders that we can no longer be those things in the ways we thought we could when I was young.

We shall now have an entire new overcoming ahead of us as our modern liberal societies rebarbarize. And as the planet that nourishes us becomes less and less hospitable because of our willfulness, we shall need new stories and new prophets to teach us how to live upon a ruined earth. We’re like some mythic witness of the sacrifice of Isaac. Everything in the world hangs on the moment as the knife begins to move and the the angel cries out, No! Or as Apollo rebukes Achilles in the Olympian assembly after the hero has brutalized Hector’s dead body:

Let him take care,
or, brave as he is, we gods will turn agaist him,
seeing him outrage the insensate earth!

For dust we are, Hector made of the same dirt as Adam. Martin Heidegger famously predicted that only a god could save us in this present crisis, which he more or less foresaw. But what if God doesn’t hear or comes too late or thinks we’re not worth saving? What if the angels stay home? What if Abraham had killed his son in a godless world and burned the boy’s bleeding body when nothing aside remained but his own conscience and self-loathing? The old stories push the narrative of human destiny to a limit the other side of which is nothing recognizably human and then provide an escape, the angel and the ram, the political machinations through which Achilles returns Hector’s body to his father and saves his own pride, the empty tomb.

Kingsworth argues that we are at a religious turn in history. I think I agree but don’t find much consolation in the fact, if fact it is, today. Kierkegaard argues that God injects a radical new command into an ordinary act of conventional piety in order both to suspend and to reground Abraham’s sense of the ethical. Gone is Abraham’s naive normative ethics in which his love of his son is grounded in his sense of family and community. But in exchange he gets to love his son again as the gift of God who, we are told, in another epoch sacrificed his only son, completing the figure.

It seems a cruel bargain on all sides, but it has the virtue of recognizing the cruelty that seems to run through our experience of the world from beginning to end. I’ve said elsewhere that I sometimes think the rift in nature is aboriginal. In the story of Isaac’s sacrifice, Abraham has a choice, and that too may be aboriginal. Indeed, had Abraham withheld his son, as Genesis presents the nature of his dilemma, he would have chosen as the Olympian gods finally demand of Achilles, having themselves abetted the hero’s excesses and marooned him morally.

But on Good Friday there’s no Olympian colloquy and especially no empty tomb, only this:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
and are so far from my cry
and from the words of my distress?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
My mouth is dried out like a pot-sherd;
my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
and you have laid me in the dust of the grave.

Another Orion piece this issue is called The Doe’s Song. It begins with the story of a car hitting a doe on a night road. Her leg is broken, and she will die. She frantically resists the ineffectual efforts of distraught humans to help her and runs away into the woods by the side of the road, the broken limb dangling uselessly. Human choice, especially the modern choice to inject inhuman agency into the cosmic balance of life and death and perhaps to have altered it permanently, has at at the very least introduced a radical post-Edenic cruelty into our experience of the world. The doe’s death is an accident, like a crucifixion.

Perhaps Abraham made the wrong choice. Perhaps Kierkegaard’s affirmation of it is wrong headed. Had Abraham made the choice Achilles made, perhaps a better angel would have appeared to explain to him that God desires mercy rather than sacrifice, as in Hosea where the ground of piety seems to shift. Or perhaps Abraham’s obedience is correct and the Angel a poor translator. On Good Friday the nails of crucifixion may be yet many iterations of Abraham’s knife, turned mad as the sword of Achilles and rending flesh like the giant engines that presently torture Canadian tar sands. This past Good Friday, though we may not realize it yet, we Americans have made Abraham’s choice, the knife, the nails, over the possible better angel.

That is why this story won’t save us—and one more thing. The empty tomb is not a talisman of the coming of spring. That is what Lent is, lent being the Old English word for spring. ‘Lent is come with love to town’ wrote an anonymous monk of the fourteenth century. So, the earth experiences the yearly round of renewal. I understand the poet’s need to call it love. But the empty tomb is a tallisman of another love altogether. “Only a god can save us,” Heidegger exclaimed. Human wullfulness and its devastation have so altered the normality of that first love that only a radical intervention, something like a resurrection, can put things right. This is what John Updike must have meant in a well-known Easter poem that has always given me trouble.

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

Such may be taken for hope by the pious, but the conventional appropriations of the old stories by churches and the hopeful humanism of modernity represent a refusal of the judgment leveled against us by knife and nail and their modern analogues, and by the poor dangling limb of a dying doe. Some deaths in which we are implicated as modern humans did not, do not, have to be. Some cruelty, and let me hear no suggestion of collateral damage as we willfully continue to channel the horror of the twentieth century into its successor—some cruelty is but the will of humans who will be neither controlled nor reproved. Here is Updike’s conclusion.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

If there is hope. If the possibility of our salvation remains in the midst of the ruin of our stories and now of our planet, that hope, that possibility will require a miracle to be achieved. The renewal of our planet and the turning of our hearts required for its enabling will not occur in the natural course of things. Hope may be real, but judgment is radical and now.

Getting to Albuquerque II

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Under some rubric listing quaint, old-fashioned expressions, I might list the word receipt. I was puzzled as a child that my Grandma Long used receipt to mean recipe, until I learned as an adult that the two words have overlapping etymologies. In receipt of is another quaint expression to my ear, sometimes regarded as stuffy and falsely formal. Nevertheless, I am in receipt of two letters that have caused my heart to swell; though both speak of hardship.

The two letters are included in a cache of my Grandma Long’s keepsakes for which I am grateful to my cousin, Marion Choate. Marion’s mother was my Aunt Frances, my father’s younger sister. So let’s start back with the photo of my father’s family I have cited previously. A note attached tells me it was taken on January 1, 1911, but that can’t be correct because my uncle Bill, the baby in my grandmother’s arms, was born March 1, 1912. Perhaps January 1, 1913 is the correct date.

The Longs of Las Cruces, circa 1913. Peter Peterson, my maternal great grandfather who had died in Oklahoma in 1910, is absent. My grandmother is holding my Uncle Bill, the baby of the family. My father is the boy in the middle between my grandfather and great grandmother Melissa Peterson who is holding my Aunt Frances’s hand. Next comes my uncle Randolph and finally, a neighbor boy whose hat covers his face. All photos are “live.” Click images to enlarge.

I don’t know the exact date of my family’s arrival in Las Cruces, but the earliest deed to the property in this photograph that I find among my grandmother’s keepsakes is dated January 20, 1912. The land was apparently not a homestead in the strict sense. Though my grandmother’s papers include several documents pertaining to the farm property, the process by which she and my grandfather acquired it is still not clear to me. In this photo it appears a hardscrabble place, but here’s how one of his obituaries describes my grandfather and his farm.

Mr. Long was born in 1879 at Minneapolis, Minn., thus being 39 years of age at the time of his death. Later the family moved to Missouri, Mr. Long moving from there to Oklahoma, where he was engaged in the newspaper business for a number of years, until seven years ago when he came to the Rio Grande Valley for the benefit of his health.

Mr Long took a small place on the outskirts of town and in spite of the handicap of il [sic] health had made a success of it and had one of the nicest little homes in the valley at the time of his death. He acquired a reputation as a very successful grower of vegetables and as one who was peculiarly conversant with farming conditions in the valley.

I could guess that my grandfather arrived in New Mexico very early in 2012. The ill health referenced in the obituary was tuberculosis; though my grandfather died in the flu epidemic of 1919 as I’ve noted previously. He had tried a sanitarium in Colorado before going to New Mexico. In the early twentieth century not much could be done for tuberculosis, though it was thought that dry climates were better for the afflicted than wet ones. I make it also that my grandfather arrived in New Mexico in advance of his wife and children, who by this reckoning might have arrived between January and March 1912.

I’m not comfortable with these dates, however, think the family could all have arrived the previous year and it could have taken them a while to get settled on the farm. When I last visited with my Uncle Randolph, around 1992, he told me that my grandfather had gone to New Mexico first and that my grandmother and the children first traveled by train to San Antonio, Texas and then traveled from there to Las Cruces in a covered wagon. My memory is that Uncle Randolph said these events occurred in 1911. The difficulty with my projected dates in 1912 as the time of the family’s trek to the Rio Grande Valley is that at that time my grandmother would have been in the last stage of her pregnancy with my Uncle Bill. Some light may be shed on this question and others by a letter I found among my grandmother’s keepsakes from my great grandmother, Melinda Akers Long, whose grave I was unable to find last fall. I’ll quote the entire text, though it is a bit lengthy.

R. 4. Hico Texas
May 23 – 1912

Dear Olin & Adda

Your letter of the 18th came this week. I am quite strong again and am enjoying Texas very well. Marian and I took a buggy ride this afternoon to see the new baby girl at Cashiou’s. We also had quite a chat with Mrs. Autrey as we came home. Hico school will close tomorrow and then Vernon will be at home. He has done well in school and is so large and strong that he can do considerable work at home. He chops cotton pulls weeds and cuts wood evenings and Saturdays and of course can accomplish more when school is out. Atticus is also very large for his age and talks so plain that he does not seem like a baby. He carries a little hoe in the field and tries to use it much of the time.

Well, I certainly am glad that you are in your own house and are able to work. I hope nothing will successfully tempt you to do more than you ought and hinder your complete recovery. Marian found several ripe strawberries this evening so you can guess what we will be doing.

You may know it seems somewhat better to be here with Marian and well than to be at Sayre sick and the neighbors waiting on me.

Lovingly,
Mama

First things first—my great grandmother was chronically ill. Though she claims to have recovered, she would barely live out the year. The cause of death listed on her death certificate is “La Grippe [influenza] complicated with bronchitis—pneumonia.” I’m guessing that she, too, had tuberculosis. The date of this letter suggests that she had just recently heard from her son that he and his family were settled, but her comment about being “in your own house” leaves open the possibility that the Las Cruces Longs had arrived previously and stayed in rented quarters for a time.

I also learn that my grandfather was known as Olin, a fact that is confirmed by another letter from an aunt in Kansas at the time of his mother’s death in 1913. I’ve mentioned the hardship reflected in these letters. My great grandmother’s mention of cotton indicates that her daughter, Marian Curtis, and her family were not merely engaged in subsistence farming in Texas but were raising a money crop as well; and her recounting of the activities of her grandson, Vernon, who was seven (or possibly eight) years old in 1912, says a great deal about how much human labor was required by their way of life. The other grandson, Atticus, who had been named for his father’s brother, would die late in 1913 of an unspecified illness that had lasted seven months. Atticus died in Pecos, Texas, at his namesake’s home. That his parents had sent him west to live with his uncle suggests to me that he may have contracted tuberculosis as well. The image of a dying boy trying to chop cotton with a small hoe speaks poignantly of the lives of these folk.

And all these folk, the Longs, the Petersons, and the Curtises had first settled in and around Sayre, Oklahoma between 1900 and 1905. At that time what would become Beckham County had just been opened to Anglo settlement. Quannah Parker still lived at his Cache establishment not far away. The place had been part of Comancheria and before that Apacheria—before the expansionist Comanches drove the Apaches off the plains. But the Southwest was changing fast. The Longs, Petersons, Curtises, and folk like them would inherit much of it.

To be continued . . .